In October 2019, 26 white-identifying students met in the Group for Abolishing Whiteness (GfAW). The GfAW was a biweekly intragroup dialogic space where white-identifying students examined and uprooted their everyday relationship to whiteness. The GfAW diverged from other, more traditional dialogic spaces in that it focused on intragroup practice and was oriented toward white abolition, ending whiteness as a social construct and dominant force, rather than reconstruction of white identity. We used white abolitionist theory, feminist theories of gender performativity, and George Yancy's theory of White Self-Criticality to analyze narrative interviews with 7 GfAW participants. Using narrative thematic analysis as our interpretative method, we came to three themes: members experienced epistemic shifts, members gained skills to sustain the epistemic shifts, and members articulated important, unresolved tensions and limitations of the group. Our analysis has implications for social work education on whiteness as well as implications for white abolition in social work and beyond.
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